Decision Making for Leaders

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Decision-Making for Leaders Preface: The Think Tank Premise The Advanced Leadership Initiative (ALI) at Harvard University is dedicated to educating and deploying a leadership force of experienced leaders who can address challenging national and global problems. An important part of this process is stimulating discussion among experts and advocates about the gaps that can be filled by Advanced Leaders, including the Advanced Leadership Fellows who are preparing to transition from their primary income-earning years to their next years of service. Each year, ALI convenes three solutionfinding workshops called Think Tanks to delve deeply into the nature of social problems, their potential solutions, the barriers to change, and the ways Advanced Leaders can make a difference. On March 29-31, 2012, leaders in the field of decision-making gathered with practitioners to discuss the nature of leadership decisions, especially by Advanced Leaders. The Think Tank was chaired by Peter Zimmerman, Senior Associate Dean for Strategic Program Development at the Harvard Kennedy School and a Co-Chair of the Advanced Leadership Initiative. While past Advanced Leadership Initiative Think Tanks focused on a particular social issue – education, health, climate, economic opportunity – the “Decision-Making for Leaders” Think Tank focused on decision-making as a leadership skill, an essential competency for Advanced Leaders. are dispersed, stakeholders are diverse, and goals are vague, ambiguous, or conflicting. Forging change thus requires a special kind of leadership. When leaders lack formal authority over an unbounded system, they need to think systemically while mastering relevant subject knowledge. They must influence individuals and groups to mobilize resources and work together. They need a highly developed sense of contextual and emotional intelligence to understand stakeholder motivations and assumptions. Finally, they have to find ways to create a shared purpose and common ground to get multiple actors to move forward on an issue. Leading within such a context requires individuals to make innumerable critical strategic, organizational, and financial decisions. With this Advanced Leadership frame in mind, roughly 100 leaders convened to discuss issues in the research and practice of decision-making and how to improve it. This report provides a narrative summary of the science and use of decision-making as discussed in this Think Tank and highlights areas in which leaders can improve upon this most essential of skills. ± Addressing an unmet social need or unsolved problem differs from assigning tasks or formulating strategies in established organizations, or exercising leadership in a domain with existing pathways and institutions. Even seemingly simple ideas for change require multiple strategies in multiple domains, taking various stakeholders into account. Advanced Leaders must work within complex and (often) poorly organized social contexts, where authority is diffused, resources Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard University 5
Decision-Making for Leaders Advanced Leadership and Decision-Making: An Essential Skill A core task for Advanced Leaders is how to enter complex, unbounded contexts characterized by diffused authority and dispersed resources and get multiple stakeholders with vague or conflicting goals to move forward on a social issue in which there is little or no established institutional pathway for solving the problem. It is a task infused with many complex and difficult decisions in which it is rarely clear, even after the fact, whether the correct choice was made. It is a task that requires highly developed judgment and decisionmaking skills. Complex decision-making is a uniquely human capability, said Peter Zimmerman, Senior Associate Dean for Strategic Program Development at the Harvard Kennedy School and Co-Chair of the Advanced Leadership Initiative. “Rats find their way through a maze and it appears that they decide to take one route over another. Slime mold grows toward a food source and seems to exhibit intelligent behavior. My dog Daisy gets up at 5:00am every day and seems to know that it’s time for breakfast and her walk. However, these behaviors are not decisions requiring the skills that leaders exercise. They are conditioned behaviors, simple patterns of stimulus and response, emerging from evolutionary and contemporary experience, automatic in character, and, as far as we know, in no way involving conscious thought & decision.” What distinguishes human intelligence and complex decision-making is the combination of three features: • Like the rats and slime mold, we are able to sense changes in our environment: what is going on around us, what do we see, hear, taste, touch and smell • Second, we are self aware, we know what’s going on inside, our varied wants and needs; we are able to make sense of changes in the environment, what they mean for us and we have the capacity to act purposefully in response to events and actions of others. We have a sense of agency: the capacity to deliberately link our actions to intent. • Third, we are able to imagine what others perceive and experience and, in effect, simulate their reaction(s) to changes in the environment. In so doing, unlike Daisy the dog, we can imagine futures outside our own experience; indeed, futures outside all human experience. It is these features in combination which enable us to know our own interests, to imagine what others think and feel, and to predict how others will likely react to what we (or yet others) say and do. It is this capacity to predict the consequences of actions and events outside our own experience – a uniquely human skill that enables complex decision-making. The traditional presentation of decision-making begins with problem definition, specification of goals, information gathering, generation and analysis of options, identification of trade-offs, prediction of outcomes with attendant risk and uncertainty, and, in the end, an act of deliberate choice. It is a well established and 6 Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard University
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Page 17 and 18: Appendix 1: Agenda, Thursday, March
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Page 29 and 30: THE ADVANCED LEADERSHIP THINK TANK

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